


podcasts are dreams

by A_Starry_Night



Category: Broadchurch, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:07:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23075230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Starry_Night/pseuds/A_Starry_Night
Summary: Paranoid habits are hard to break.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	podcasts are dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Listening to WtnV and then watching Broadchurch somehow led to this. Don't quite know where it came from, but here it is anyway.

Miller calls him paranoid. Distrustful. She blames it on Tess’s unfaithfulness, perhaps even on his less-than-ideal childhood. You can only witness your dad beating your mum so many times with everyone else ignoring the signs before you learn that no one cares, after all.

It’s more than that, though. However many years it’s been, no matter how many miles away he is, there will always be a part of him that is positive that his every action and thought is being monitored and recorded; that one morning he’ll look out the window to find himself back there with a black van idling on the other end of the street. 

The Faceless Old Woman followed him. He hasn’t seen her, per se, aside from glimpses in the mirror in the mornings; Miller called him out when he didn’t shave for a month. Then there’s the time he came home from a sixteen hour shift from work to find a package of bloody meat stinking up his bed, and his medicine cabinet completely reorganized. 

He’d yelled at her for the former—and grudgingly thanked her for the latter. That night she’d whispered in his ear, “Pretending won’t make it go away, you know. You’ll be screaming and dead soon enough—why not have some fun in the meantime?”

There are reactions he can’t quite shake. He practically breaks out in hives whenever he steps foot in a church, or when God is discussed (is that a Smile?). Tess had looked at him askance the first few times he’d hesitated to enter any religious building, but luckily Miller is as religiously dense as most nowadays. She doesn’t find his loathing of religion anything to bat an eye at.

He’s very glad that Paul Coates is not a perpetually smiling, perky sort of person. _That_ just makes it so much worse.

There’s one thing only that he keeps doing—and that is listening to the radio. He never does so when Daisy is there at home, mind, but listening in and hearing the familiar tones of the radio host is something he can’t quite shake. There is no way of forgetting what he’s experienced, except maybe by going insane but he’s too stubborn to do that, and not even to himself will he admit that a part of him might actually think fondly of any of that inexplicable desert town.

He slips up exactly once with it all when he mentions America in a conversation with Miller.

She looks both confused and intrigued. “Didn’t think you’ve ever been.”

She’s tenacious, and without a proper heading off she’ll never let it go. He opts for a half-truth like he had when she’d asked him why he’d come back to Broadchurch.

“Wasn’t planned, just sort of… happened.”

He can’t ever tell her. Can’t tell her about the town that sits and breathes on the line of impossibility, of stone circles and invisible corn. Won’t ever point out the starless void yawning wide far above their heads, or the countless other things that exist that the uninformed eye always misses. 

Let her live in ignorance. A detective’s life is one of solving crimes, of piecing together the logical explanation, and shouldering the knowledge of the worst of humanity. People like him and Miller face fears every day.

He can’t face fears like these, though. The town never leaves, never allows itself to be forgotten; it burrows itself in the skin and dreams and lives and _breathes_ , a parasitic reality that demands and takes without remorse. There’s more than one reason why he doesn’t sleep well anymore.

He can’t question the reality of his own existence, because if he does then he runs the risk of truly losing it. It’s the one thing that he can’t _not_ wonder about, and it causes a pit of dread and curiosity to grow in his stomach whenever he remembers. Remembers the sandstorm. Remembers the blood, and the violence, and the voices of the radio hosts. 

Remembers his own face, looking back at him. 

_The bodies of some replaced by others who were, we were, all the same to begin with…_

The worst thing about it all, he thinks, is that he doesn’t know _which one of him he is_.


End file.
